You don't have to follow tech to find lessons in the young activist's suicide.

One of the most remarkable things about the suicide of Aaron Swartz is just how quickly it exploded out of the tech world and into the mainstream press and latched onto latent anger at the tactics of federal prosecutors. It was no surprise to see someone like law professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend and mentor to Swartz, write a post called "Prosecutor as Bully" soon after the news broke:

The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

Cybercrime is a serious problem. National security and economic interests, not to mention privacy and fraud prevention, are at stake. But those very real problems, the rhetoric associated with them, and the financial resources that follow, have been used to justify a legal regime which as often than not is used against whistleblowers, disloyal employees, and activists... If money, prestige and jobs are going to go to the offices that get the most cybercrime convictions, we aren't going to get what we are paying for. We need more data and scholorship here. We need to figure out why US Attorney's Offices, and Massachusetts, New Jersey and the Central District of California in particular, are pursuing so many troubling cases.

The CFAA's vague language, broad reach, and harsh punishments combine to create a powerful weapon for overeager prosecutors to unleash on people they don't like. Aaron was facing the possibility of decades in prison for accessing the MIT network and downloading academic papers as part of his activism work for open access to knowledge. No prosecutor should have tools to threaten to end someone's freedom for such actions, but the CFAA helped to make that fate a realistic fear for Aaron.

The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute. It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute. Using the law in this way could criminalize many everyday activities and allow for outlandishly severe penalties.

Such sentiments spread quickly into less tech-focused venues. Columbia law professor Tim Wu, for instance, the man who coined the term "network neutrality," wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which the prosecutors again came in for a shellacking:

In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest...

The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm... Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life.

Even those who didn't write extensively about technology began taking up the cry. Soon the "prosecutorial overreach" argument made its way into Slate, where Emily Bazelon expanded it even further to critique the US federal prosecution system more generally.

Prosecutors persuaded of their own righteousness, and woodenly equating downloading a deliberately unprotected database with stealing, lose all sense of proportion and bring in the heavy artillery when what’s in order is a far more mild penalty.

I’d like to tell you that the prosecutorial overreach that took place in Swartz’s case rarely happens. But that’s not true. There are many principled prosecutors who only bring charges they believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But there are also some who bring any charge they can think of to induce a defendant who may be guilty of a minor crime to plead guilty to a major one. These cases usually are hard to call attention to: They’re not about innocence, easy and pure. They’re about the muddier concept of proportionality. If any good at all can come from Swartz’s unspeakably sorrowful death, maybe it will be how this case makes prosecutors—and the rest of us—think about the space between guilt and innocence.

Dale Cooper, who bills himself as a "porn performer and writer," wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in which he went beyond federal prosecutors to the Obama administration that oversees them.

I believe that the prosecution for the United States threatened Swartz's emotional and physical well-being, and, faced with a court battle that he could not possibly finance with his own personal wealth, he took his own life. Ortiz bullied Swartz. Her office should be held responsible in some way for his death.

By extension, the Obama administration, in refusing to intercede, should be held accountable, as well. This administration has made the policing of information and "protection" of intellectual property a priority, appointing many trademark hawks and keeping an unnerving record of prosecution of whistleblowers in an attempt to stymy government leaks. The disproportionate charges for Swartz's alleged actions are symptomatic of an administration that has chosen to make an example of specific individuals (such as Bradley Manning), to be heads on pikes on the White House lawn.

The Atlantic's Clive Crook, a well-known writer on politics and economics, also got interested in the case and drew the same broad lessons from it. He ended with a powerful plea for reform of the entire method of plea bargaining:

Assume what Swartz did was simple, selfish, unmitigated theft, as the prosecutors appear to think. Even on that ethically brainless view, the charges and threatened penalties were so disproportionate as to be quite unhinged. But here's the point: Under the present dispensation, they're actually rational. That's why Swartz's family is right to impugn the wider criminal-justice system.

By and large, American prosecutors no longer fight their cases at trial. The new dispensation is justice by plea bargain. The more savage the penalties prosecutors can threaten, the more likely the defendant (guilty or innocent) is to speed things along by pleading guilty and accepting a light penalty. According to the Wall Street Journal, Swartz was offered the choice of pleading guilty and going to jail for six to eight months, or else going to trial and taking his chances. The multiple counts and their absurdly savage sentences are best seen, just as the family said, as instruments of intimidation.

The prosecutor's bottom line, apparently, was that Swartz had to go to jail. In my conception of criminal justice, the prosecutor's role is to establish guilt, not pass sentence. Juries have already been substantially dispensed with in this country. (By substantially, I mean in 97 percent of cases.) If prosecutors are not only going to rule on guilt unilaterally but also, in effect, pass sentence as well, one wonders why we can't also dispense with judges.

Even Andrew Sullivan, one of the best-known political bloggers in the country, has picked up the case and is now hammering away at it with the voice of moral outrage. For Sullivan, what's at stake is nothing less than the broadest of issues: how the "justice" doled out to the powerful can differ from that dispensed to everyone else:

They demurred on prosecuting war criminals (hey, they're all government buddies and what's a few prisoners tortured to death among friends?), but they sure as hell hounded Aaron Swartz to his death. It really speaks to how justice is so often these days a weapon of the powerful, not a defense for the powerless.

Not every commenter has agreed that prosecutors overreached; take for instance a fascinating piece by law professor and former Department of Justice lawyer Orin Kerr in which he largely defends the basic approach to the case while still bashing the CFAA. (The anger has been palpable enough, however, that US Attorney Carmen Ortiz issued an unusual statement defending her office and its approach.)

But it's remarkable just how quickly one young geek's death has mobilized even national political columnists—who by this point must have seen just about everything—into an outrage that grew beyond Swartz and has quickly opened up a national conversation about justice and about how we seek it.

I was pressing the same arguments of procedural overreach and prosecution entrapment when Tommy Chong got entrapped and subsequently went to jail in an obviously misguided personal vandetta against him over glassware. This kind of thing is harder reform than firearm or patent laws.

The justice system is designed for judge and jury. With prosecutors increasingly side-lining them to make unilateral decisions about the fate of the alleged criminal through threat and intimidation, it cannot be a system of justice.

This is more of an editorial in support of a public that stands against government (Obama or Bush or ...) bullies. Ars portrayed the Jamie-Lynn Thomas trials the same way. I find it hard to find any sympathy at all for the government's tactics but maybe I've been brainwashed and it is why I keep reading Ars!

It's disappointing to see media outlets trying to outdo each other with exaggerated accounts about how much time he would get in prison, 20 years, 30 years, 35 years, 50 years, etc. In reality he was facing six months. Usually Ars is a counter balance to this kind of sensationalism.

And how many trillions of dollars are you all willing to pay in extra taxes so that the other 90%+ of cases which end in guilty pleas go to trial?

You guys have no grasp on reality. None whatsoever.

Guilty pleas are a good thing. They save money, they allow the person who committed the crime to start down the path that leads to forgiveness, they let everyone involved acknowledge that wrong was done, and it lets people move on with their lives.

Trials only exist for those cases where people want to challenge the system, or want to get off, either because they are innocent or because they believe that they can beat the rap or that their rights were violated. Most of the time, you don't need a trial, and there shouldn't need to be a trial.

I want you to re-read the bolded sentence you wrote. If you don't immediately see why it's horrible, read it again. Repeat this process until you understand why that sentence is horrible.

I'm actually a proponent of stiff penalties. However, they need to be proportional.

35 (or more) years is in no way proportional.

For the data theft, I could see a pretty stiff fine. Maybe $500 a file or something.

For the breaking and entering, put him on probation for a few years. He was in a place he knew he shouldn't be, but he didn't break anything, and it was a semipublic building. Check in once a week, have to get the OK to leave town, keep your nose clean or else.

Guilty pleas are a good thing. They save money, they allow the person who committed the crime to start down the path that leads to forgiveness, they let everyone involved acknowledge that wrong was done, and it lets people move on with their lives.

There was no crime to begin with. In judging if a crime has taken place one should bring fourth the accused, and bring fourth the victim. There is no victim here. JSTOR lost nothing, all their subscriptions are from universities, research institutions and the like, who wouldn't ditch them in favor of Swartz's Pirate Bay upload, had he actually been able to successfully upload the content.

Titanium Dragon wrote:

Since when? Look at their Kim Dotcom coverage for another example of their bias.

They're the Fox news of pro-piracy, pro-cracking. They're throwing red meat to the ignorant and reinforcing their crazy.

Ars is anti-piracy by official stance, something I disagree with them and their parent, Conde Nast on. So I don't know what you're getting at there.

And how many trillions of dollars are you all willing to pay in extra taxes so that the other 90%+ of cases which end in guilty pleas go to trial?

You guys have no grasp on reality. None whatsoever.

Guilty pleas are a good thing. They save money, they allow the person who committed the crime to start down the path that leads to forgiveness, they let everyone involved acknowledge that wrong was done, and it lets people move on with their lives....

Carmen?

Now seriously: please bargains should be forbidden, where's the "right to fair trial"? Saying it saves time & money is tackling the symptom rather than the cause - over prosecution & stuff reaching courts that shouldn't have.

IMHO the problem is more fundamental than this.Electing people to fill purely professional positions.Democracy is all nice & well - but would you also elect Doctors?The people of Massachusetts (and many other districts) are choosing someone to uphold their laws in courts based on "Conviction rate" and how well they kiss babies...She wasn't there to prosecute, she was there to flush up her resume on her way to her next political appointment (Mayor? Congress Member? Governor?) Everyone is angry when they discover "Meter maids" (or whatever they're call these days) or traffic police have to fill quotas - but choosing a DA based on that seems legit...

How is this any different than Sandy Hook prompting all the gun outrage?

It's just a hot button issue that people can use as a vehicle for their agendas.

I feel sorry for his family, but...that's it. It's a terrible thing to lose a family member before their time, but as for the rest, everyone just needs to stop feeding on what is a sad situation for the family, and nobody else's business.

The prosecutor was following established procedural precedents, and she did nothing wrong by her moral compass or superiors. It's sad that a person couldn't handle it, but the fact is, if he wasn't well known, this wouldn't be a story.

So either express outrage every time this happens, or admit to being a hypocrite.

And how many trillions of dollars are you all willing to pay in extra taxes so that the other 90%+ of cases which end in guilty pleas go to trial?

You guys have no grasp on reality. None whatsoever.

Guilty pleas are a good thing. They save money, they allow the person who committed the crime to start down the path that leads to forgiveness, they let everyone involved acknowledge that wrong was done, and it lets people move on with their lives.

[...]

This guy was evil. You guys all have been lionizing him, but the truth is that he went to another school because if he had done it at Harvard, it would have negatively impacted himself. He was willing to inconvenience others, wasting hours of time and forcing the entire school off of JSTOR, but he wasn't willing to let himself be inconvenienced. That is evil. Evil is not killing babies; evil is selfishness without regard to others. He wasn't as evil as a nazi, but his actions cost thousands of dollars worth of time.

I don't know what world you live in, but it's not the same one that I live in.

I'm a cop and I probably see more of the justice system than most. The system stinks if you are innocent because everything is stacked against you. The district attorney has federal agencies, police and investigators. To say nothing of government funding.

You have your personal funds to hire an attorney. Or accept a grossly underfunded public defender who has many cases and will likely encourage you to accept a plea bargain to lower his case load.

Guilty pleas are often forced on people by using the threat of huge penalties. Are they a good thing? Yes, sometimes. But not in this sort of case where it's very hard to find a victim - the documents that Swartz took were never distributed, and the company who owned the documents were not pushing for the lad to be prosecuted.

You say this guy was evil. I bet you didn't know him and you know nothing about him beyond recent articles. Your determination that he was evil is, to say the least, crass stupidity. You don't know evil. I can point you at evil guys, and they are nothing like Swartz. Trust me on this.

But it's remarkable just how quickly one young geek's death has mobilized even national political columnists—who by this point must have seen just about everything—into an outrage that grew beyond Swartz and has which has quickly opened up a national conversation about justice, and about how we seek it.

Much like that school shooting and the issue of guns. Think we'll get rid of CFAA before we'll get rid of our guns?

And how many trillions of dollars are you all willing to pay in extra taxes so that the other 90%+ of cases which end in guilty pleas go to trial?

You guys have no grasp on reality. None whatsoever.

Guilty pleas are a good thing. They save money, they allow the person who committed the crime to start down the path that leads to forgiveness, they let everyone involved acknowledge that wrong was done, and it lets people move on with their lives.

[...]

This guy was evil. You guys all have been lionizing him, but the truth is that he went to another school because if he had done it at Harvard, it would have negatively impacted himself. He was willing to inconvenience others, wasting hours of time and forcing the entire school off of JSTOR, but he wasn't willing to let himself be inconvenienced. That is evil. Evil is not killing babies; evil is selfishness without regard to others. He wasn't as evil as a nazi, but his actions cost thousands of dollars worth of time.

I don't know what world you live in, but it's not the same one that I live in.

I'm a cop and I probably see more of the justice system than most. The system stinks if you are innocent because everything is stacked against you. The district attorney has federal agencies, police and investigators. To say nothing of government funding.

You have your personal funds to hire an attorney. Or accept a grossly underfunded public defender who has many cases and will likely encourage you to accept a plea bargain to lower his case load.

Guilty pleas are often forced on people by using the threat of huge penalties. Are they a good thing? Yes, sometimes. But not in this sort of case where it's very hard to find a victim - the documents that Swartz took were never distributed, and the company who owned the documents were not pushing for the lad to be prosecuted.

You say this guy was evil. I bet you didn't know him and you know nothing about him beyond recent articles. Your determination that he was evil is, to say the least, crass stupidity. You don't know evil. I can point you at evil guys, and they are nothing like Swartz. Trust me on this.

A) Thank you for your service as a member of the police.B) As someone who isn't a member of academia, you don't understand what the loss of JSTOR access can do to you if you are operating under a deadline. It is not outside the possibility that tenure decision can be changed due to missed deadlines and unpublished papers.

IMHO the problem is more fundamental than this.Electing people to fill purely professional positions.Democracy is all nice & well - but would you also elect Doctors?The people of Massachusetts (and many other districts) are choosing someone to uphold their laws in courts based on "Conviction rate" and how well they kiss babies...She wasn't there to prosecute, she was there to flush up her resume on her way to her next political appointment (Mayor? Congress Member? Governor?) Everyone is angry when they discover "Meter maids" (or whatever they're call these days) or traffic police have to fill quotas - but choosing a DA based on that seems legit...

Don't over generalize. I know very good people in those positions and have great integrity and upstanding moral values and are not quick to judge. Yes, there's bad people everywhere, and I'm willing to bet that some of them can be found in your circle of family and friends. I agree that people in positions of great power should be held to the highest possible standards, but no system is fool-proof and you'll find crooks and thieves in every corner of life.

But it's remarkable just how quickly one young geek's death has mobilized even national political columnists—who by this point must have seen just about everything—into an outrage that grew beyond Swartz and has which has quickly opened up a national conversation about justice, and about how we seek it.

Much like that school shooting and the issue of guns. Think we'll get rid of CFAA before we'll get rid of our guns?

Which happened with a gun that he was not licensed to own. Huh, funny how that is often overlooked.

Sure, it was his mom's. If she'd properly secured it, as recommended by, well, every gun group ever, he wouldn't have been able to use it to kill her or anyone else.

B) As someone who isn't a member of academia, you don't understand what the loss of JSTOR access can do to you if you are operating under a deadline. It is not outside the possibility that tenure decision can be changed due to missed deadlines and unpublished papers.

@TD: Glad that I'm not the only one who sees things this way.

So you are saying that somebody's entire future make rest on access to JSTOR - a commercial company. Doesn't this seem more than slightly wrong to you?

And if your access is that important I'm pretty certain you could get access fairly trivially. Worst case, you actually have to pay the fees yourself. Gasp! That be a good thing as you might realize what a racket JSTOR is. They get articles for nothing, peer reviews for nothing. All they do is provide some minor bureaucratic functions and a place to store the data. I've seen estimates ranging from $1 to $3 for their costs per article - articles they sell for $20 and up.

When a person has the power to even utter such words; let alone enforce them: I can put you in for 35 years or you can agree to my terms and I can get you 6 months; then you know you have a problem at a system-wide level. Just how come the prosecutor gets to decide and tell how much punishment to file charges for. His job is to collect facts and present them.

I personally like to call this: forcing a confession at gun (of law) point.

Did he do something stupid? Yep. But the thing is, it was mental illness that caused him to take his own life. Depression, if untreated can and often does lead to suicide. But it's easier to blame the big evil boogeyman instead of looking at mental illness.

I'm a cop and I probably see more of the justice system than most. The system stinks if you are innocent because everything is stacked against you. The district attorney has federal agencies, police and investigators. To say nothing of government funding.

Of course it sucks to be innocent and accused of a crime. You are innocent until proven guilty but it doesn't mean being wrongfully accused is roses at all. The problem is that there's really no way around this fact. You could (potentially) completely governmentalize the system, but I have the feeling it would be horribly expensive.

Quote:

Guilty pleas are often forced on people by using the threat of huge penalties. Are they a good thing? Yes, sometimes. But not in this sort of case where it's very hard to find a victim - the documents that Swartz took were never distributed, and the company who owned the documents were not pushing for the lad to be prosecuted.

Its actually very easy to find a victim; the problem is that people don't recognize the damage that he did.

The damage he did was a fewfold:

1) He wasted the network admin's time, both at MIT and JSTOR, trying to keep him out of the system. This means he damaged them and damaged their employers, who had to spend money on them doing that instead of other work.

2) As a result of his actions, JSTOR temporarily cut off access to all of MIT. This causes harm to MIT (who loses a service they pay for) as well as everyone at MIT who needs that service, as their work was disrupted by lack of access.

Thus his victims were JSTOR, MIT, the network admins of both, and all the researchers at MIT who lost access to JSTOR as a result of his actions. Additionally, the result of this is to further attack open networks (which are convenient for colleges to have) because it demonstrates that people will abuse them, and calls into question whether they should exist, thus harming everyone who has any interest in using an open network, which is pretty much everyone.

astie wrote:

And if your access is that important I'm pretty certain you could get access fairly trivially. Worst case, you actually have to pay the fees yourself. Gasp! That be a good thing as you might realize what a racket JSTOR is. They get articles for nothing, peer reviews for nothing. All they do is provide some minor bureaucratic functions and a place to store the data. I've seen estimates ranging from $1 to $3 for their costs per article - articles they sell for $20 and up.

The problem is that most of those articles are never going to be used at all, and, in fact, most people -already- are paying for JSTOR - these people pay to use MIT's facilities, meaning that they are already having to pay for access to the database.

Put aside the specific question of Aaron Swartz for a moment. A vast, vast majority of plea bargains do not occur because the prosecutor strong-armed an innocent person into pleading guilty. The vast, vast majority of plea bargains occur because the person is legitimately guilty, with plenty of evidence to prove it.

That's what Titanium Dragon meant when he said "Most of the time, you don't need a trial, and there shouldn't need to be a trial." He didn't mean that in such instances someone wouldn't have the right to a trial. He just meant that it's a good thing for there to be a process to save everyone the time/expense of a trial if the defendant is willing to just say "you know what, I did it". And the bargaining process is a way for the government to say "I know you did it, you know you did, if we save the time/expense of a trial, we're willing to give you a slightly lower sentence, because that will free up resources to investigate and prosecute other criminals".

Regardless what you believe about Aaron, it's crazy to think that the concept of plea bargaining in general is the problem here.

For what Swartz was doing, he should have gone to jail for at least a few years, plea bargain or not. His actions could have destroyed a lot of lives. Lots of people at JSTOR could have have been out of work if he had succeeded in making their product worthless.

What he did to MIT is no trivial matter either, and that's definitely something he should have gone to jail for a few extra months for, at least.

He was clearly an intelligent person, and I'm sad that he killed himself. Having said that, I'm also sad that he evaded justice by choosing to commit suicide.

It might be a good thing if the people at JSTOR were unemployed. We (the people) might be able to see the research we paid for at a reasonable price. And I'd take a bet that Google (or some other company) would take on the work that JSTOR does without the huge markup. Maybe even for free.

And what, exactly, did he do to MIT? He downloaded a lot of data using their network. Could he have reasonably foreseen that JSTOR would grossly over-react and pull for the plug (for a very short time) on all of MIT? No, JSTOR could have handled simply by calling MIT, getting them to look at their logs and turn off network access to that system.

And if your access is that important I'm pretty certain you could get access fairly trivially. Worst case, you actually have to pay the fees yourself. Gasp! That be a good thing as you might realize what a racket JSTOR is. They get articles for nothing, peer reviews for nothing. All they do is provide some minor bureaucratic functions and a place to store the data. I've seen estimates ranging from $1 to $3 for their costs per article - articles they sell for $20 and up.

They pay the publishers of the journals $10 millions dollars a year for their contents.

They spend $3.5 millions annually to scan backlog of journals that's not "born digital" to expand the access.

The spend about the same for the long term preservation of printed journals to decades if not centuries.

And much more. All supported by the subscription revenues.

I had said on this discussion before, JSTOR doesn't have any exclusive contracts that I am aware off. If people think the task they perform are so trivial and high margin, you are welcome to do the same and undercut them.

It might be a good thing if the people at JSTOR were unemployed. We (the people) might be able to see the research we paid for at a reasonable price. And I'd take a bet that Google (or some other company) would take on the work that JSTOR does without the huge markup. Maybe even for free.

If Google take over doing it, how long will they maintain it before they have another "Spring Cleaning," discontinuing the service and delete the data.

When a person has the power to even utter such words; let alone enforce them: I can put you in for 35 years or you can agree to my terms and I can get you 6 months; then you know you have a problem at a system-wide level. Just how come the prosecutor gets to decide and tell how much punishment to file charges for. His job is to collect facts and present them.

I personally like to call this: forcing a confession at gun (of law) point.

A prosecutor doesn't hand down sentencing. They can request a sentence, but it is up to a jury to convict, and a judge to sentence. A prosecutor only gets discretion in sentencing if there's a plea bargain. As this is a mutual agreement between the plaintiff and accused, this is entirely legal. Don't like the terms of the bargain? Don't accept it, and take your case before the judge and jury.

It might be a good thing if the people at JSTOR were unemployed. We (the people) might be able to see the research we paid for at a reasonable price. And I'd take a bet that Google (or some other company) would take on the work that JSTOR does without the huge markup. Maybe even for free.

Go source the originals, index, catalog, and republish them yourself, and then tell us what's a "reasonable price".

Quote:

And what, exactly, did he do to MIT? He downloaded a lot of data using their network. Could he have reasonably foreseen that JSTOR would grossly over-react and pull for the plug (for a very short time) on all of MIT? No, JSTOR could have handled simply by calling MIT, getting them to look at their logs and turn off network access to that system.

If he had really felt that way, he should have just pulled this stunt at Harvard, where he belonged.

I have to say, it's astonishing and depressing to see how completely uncritical the Ars editorial staff, and many of their readers, are of Swartz' actions and his culpability to his own legal problems and death. It's amazing how people who claim to be so observant can willingly pull the blinders down when it suits their purposes.

1) He wasted the network admin's time, both at MIT and JSTOR, trying to keep him out of the system. This means he damaged them and damaged their employers, who had to spend money on them doing that instead of other work.

2) As a result of his actions, JSTOR temporarily cut off access to all of MIT. This causes harm to MIT (who loses a service they pay for) as well as everyone at MIT who needs that service, as their work was disrupted by lack of access.

Do you think thats worth 50 years or more in jail? Thats what he was potentially looking at.

1) He wasted the network admin's time, both at MIT and JSTOR, trying to keep him out of the system. This means he damaged them and damaged their employers, who had to spend money on them doing that instead of other work.

2) As a result of his actions, JSTOR temporarily cut off access to all of MIT. This causes harm to MIT (who loses a service they pay for) as well as everyone at MIT who needs that service, as their work was disrupted by lack of access.

Do you think thats worth 50 years or more in jail? Thats what he was potentially looking at.

No, he was not. That red herring has been put to rest time and time again.

He was facing 6 months and a felony on his record. That was the plea bargain he turned down.

1) He wasted the network admin's time, both at MIT and JSTOR, trying to keep him out of the system. This means he damaged them and damaged their employers, who had to spend money on them doing that instead of other work.

2) As a result of his actions, JSTOR temporarily cut off access to all of MIT. This causes harm to MIT (who loses a service they pay for) as well as everyone at MIT who needs that service, as their work was disrupted by lack of access.

Do you think thats worth 50 years or more in jail? Thats what he was potentially looking at.

You don't read so well. As has been clarified over, and over, and over again: He was offered a plea bargain for 6 months. The prosecutor told his defense counsel that she would ask for 7 years if he was tried and convicted on all charges. His defense counsel said that they had nearly reached a plea agreement for zero jail time. This is all directly sourced from his defense counsel.